Changelog for WebGPU in Chromium / Dawn 94

[Corentin Wallez]

Hey all,

TL;DR: Lots of breaking changes to catch up to the spec. New features like 3D textures, compilation info and external textures. Lots of behind-the-scenes hardening for the Origin Trial.

You can find the details of the updates in this document. Below is the introduction of it for context.

Chromium's WebGPU implementation and Dawn's API try to closely follow changes to the WebGPU specification. When the WebGPU IDL changes, Chromium and Dawn will try to support both the deprecated and the new version of the IDL at the same time so prototypes can be updated. In JavaScript, uses of the deprecated path will result in a console warning, while when using Dawn directly, the deprecated path will print a warning to stderr.

Note that all changes to Dawn’s API make it closer to webgpu.h that we hope will allow applications to target both Dawn, and wgpu in native before being compiled in WASM. Emscripten will also be updated from the “old” to the “new” API but won’t have the smooth transition since developers control which version of emscripten they use.

Items deprecated in this changelog will be removed in the next branched version of Chromium. They will also be removed in Chromium Canary and top of tree Dawn two weeks after this changelog is published  in Canary and top of tree Dawn (so starting 2021-09-03).

Cheers,

Corentin